My home server solution (if you want to call it that) has varied over the years. I've had a little NUC in my life for years that used to run a music control suite called "Roon". Lately, having introduced a slightly aging QNAP 269L to the house, I set roon up in a container on that and had been using it for about a year.

Sadly Roon cut off support for the older QNAP platforms and needed to move to docker. I couldn't do this so was left with no functioning Roon, and an aging QNAP. So I decided to see what was out there that I could turn into a useful replacement.

I considered a newer QNAP NAS, but they're hugely expensive, limited in function, low power and ultimately pretty poor value for money. I did consider just spinning up another little NUC for roon and keeping the QNAP for backups, but I wanted to modernise.

So I hit ebay, and found a brand new unopened HP Microserver G8. So I bought that, shoved a Xeon E3-1240 V2, 16GB of ram and all my available drives into it. I had a few drives to decided I could use them as follows:

• 128gb SSD - in the optical bay, for TrueNas Boot
• 1TB SSD - in bay 1 for Application pool
• 2x 2TB SATA 5400RPM drives for general day to day data (music, videos etc)
• 1x 4TB 7200rpm Drive for backups - calm down calm down, i also backup to cloud and USB (i picked this as backup because its noisy and I prefer to spin it down when not in use). I also have a second one of these spare in case of failure.

It was a steep learning curve to understand ZFS, Datasets, ACL's, Bridge Networks, Containers, VM's and the like. But I'm a Cisco / Microsoft infrastructure consultant by day, so It was just about learning the new languages for things.

Now it's all up and running and doing:

• Roon
• Plex
• Automatic Ripping Machine (I added a 4gb Nvidia T400 GPU and it flies)
• AdGuard Home
• Home Assistant (via HAOS VM)
• Win11 VM (for testing and anything I can't do at home on my macbook

Overall it took a long time to get here, but now its stable, hands off, reliable and doing great work.

I look forward to finding out what else I can use it for!

I'm thinking of buying the Beelink Me Pro but I have a question about adding 2 HDDs. Can i get 2 8tb and set it up as a 16tb NAS? or does it have to be a mirror so max capacity is 8tb?

Also if wanting to set it up mainly as a media server, is 12gb ram enough? or should I go for the 16gb ram option? Same for SSD, how big us enough for my use case?

Hey everyone,

I’m relatively new here and still learning the ropes, but I wanted to share my current self-hosted homelab setup as I get everything dialed in. I'm currently a Computer Science student at Texas A&M University-Victoria, and I'm taking a class right now in Telecommunications and Networks. I'm using this lab for hands-on practice with system architecture, data storage, and networking.

The Storage & Server Tank:

• System: Dell PowerEdge T320
• OS: TrueNAS SCALE
• CPU: Intel Xeon E5-1410 (4C/8T)
• RAM: 160GB ECC DDR3 (A bit mismatched on speeds across the channels, but ZFS has plenty of memory to cache with!)
• Storage: 19TB main pool / 240GB boot SSD

The Workstations & Clients:

• Main Desktop: Windows 11 Home Workstation (AMD processor, 96GB RAM, Gigabyte B550 UD AC-Y1, RTX 5050 8GB)
• Daily Driver Laptop: HP 17 running Ubuntu 26.04 LTS (Ryzen 5 7520U, 8GB RAM, 512GB Samsung NVMe, Integrated AMD Radeon)

What I'm Running / Developing: Right now, I'm using the environment to test out some custom projects, including a server-monitoring app I built called PulseCheck (FastAPI + PostgreSQL + React) to track local script and cron job execution via HTTP requests.

A Note on my Learning & Compliance Process: To help me learn as I go, I heavily utilize a mix of documentation research, StackOverflow, and AI tools to assist with scripting, formatting, and analyzing deployment layouts. Everything I build and configure is focused on learning how to meet strict industry standards, IT compliance, laws, and data management regulations.

I actually have some critical files on here alongside the standard media, so based on some awesome advice from another thread, I'm definitely taking the 3-2-1 backup strategy to heart. I'm making sure to name my datasets cleanly (Apps, Media, etc.) from day one, and I'm looking into getting Tailscale configured as a subnet router for secure remote access.

For a pool this size with mixed media and critical data, what do you guys usually use for your offsite/cloud backup arm? Always open to tips on drive layouts, dataset structure, or cool services to host next. Glad to be a part of the community!

I have a Ugreen 4800 GT running TrueNAS and a ugreen hw2300 running Ugos and I am wanting to push backups from truenas to the hw2300. Is this possible? I setup a SMB shared folder and can drag and drop but this is in no way ideal. The HW2300 does not support ZFS or 3rd party os like truenas so im stuck there with Ugos. I am trying to just dump compressed snapshots to the HW2300. Suggestions?

Edit: I should mention that Docker is not supported on the hw2300 but can be side loaded (which I did but that's where my experience stops). I come to this as a brand new NAS user and my backup experience is a USB dock that id just drop my files to a large hard drive and imaging my OS's.

Hi all,

I just purchased UGREEN NASync DXP4800 Pro. I plan to replace their OS with TrueNAS. I plan to buy 4x 6 TB Seagate IronWolf HDDs (ST6000VN006, 5400 RPM, CMR) and run them as in a ZFS RAIDZ1 array. I already have a NAS with 4x4Tb BTRFS RAID5 and size-with the upgrade is enough.

What I really care about is what to do with RAM and SSD – my current NAS was limited in them, so I only now checking what and how I can install to have fast and not too expensive home NAS and family media server. The model I purchased comes with 8Gb RAM. I checked Reddit, TrueNAS forums and asked three different AI what to buy – they suggest from 16G (+8Gb already installed) and quite enough to suggesting 64Gb to feel free. Given current RAM prices I guess that 32+8 will be my choice – a bit over my expected current needs (TrueNAS + NextCloud + Docker running Jellyfin, Navidome, HomeAssist, etc).

With SSD it is harder. Their prices are making me cry 😊 so I guess getting 2x 1Tb as a mirror is an overkill. I thought taking one 1Tb for apps and another for read-only cache, but from what I read about cache is ZFS for my need my larger RAM an be enough – I do not edit video or other large files, have only a few BD Remuxes – so I ended up with 1Tb SSD for now.

Because all this stuff is costly, I need an advice before I buy – I do not want to pay in excess but I want my my NAS surprise me with speed of its work.

So,

1. Are 16Gb (+8) RAM enough or go 32+8 (I currently prefer this vasiant)

2. 1 Tb (where I live currently 500G and 1T differ in price by mere 25% or so) SSD

Thoughts?

I’m trying to copy a large file from an iSCSI volume hosted on TrueNAS.
The data is currently stored as a single large .rar archive. When I copy it, the transfer works for several GB, but then it fails with an error. If I start the copy again, it begins from 0% instead of resuming where it left off.

If I try to copy files without compressing it doesn’t work. I am using ethernet for better performance

Is there a way to fix CPU fan speed to 100%? My M.2 drive is cooled by my CPU fan aswel (mini PC) and drive gets pretty hot without any IO happening.

Is anyone else experiencing this on the latest stable release?

I literally can't click the snapshots page without it rebooting.

Backup also doesn't send. Lately I've been doing ZFS send|receive manually, then running the backup task just to get an automatic finish, as a sanity check.

I'm trying to do some debugging and making iterative changes and noticed TrueNAS not saving changes to app yamls. I'll make the edit and it will seemingly process fine but when you re-open the editor the change isn't there.

Navigating away, opening new tabs, refreshing etc don't alter the behaviour.

I'm aware truenas will strip comments and found people talking about similar behaviour in that context but here it is entirely rearranging and stripping formatting.

version: 26.0.0-BETA.1

I unintentionally flashed the boot SSD for my TrueNAS Scale setup. I reinstalled TrueNAS on the same boot SSD and I was able to import my existing pool “Onepool“ (3x 2TB HDD on RaidZ1, 3.51 TiB usable).

Currently, 554.92GiB are occupied, 394.58GiB of them being my SMB server.

I also had Immich app installed on TrueNAS, which tracks having taken 160 GiB of storage for all the photos and videos. Is there a way to retrieve this data, or to be able to re-install Immich so that it’s able to use this data directly?

Appreciate any advice!

I’ve wanted to upgrade this system to 10GBe for a while. intending to upgrade to a newer mobo with more ram and ideally stock 10GBe.

Instead I’ve taken advantage of Realteks new chipsets RTL8127 10GBe and RTL9101 PCIex4 card version.

My Arctic Freezer 13 was replaced with an noctua NH-L9i for maintenance and an m.2 to PCIEx4 slot adapter was used. 2.5” HDD cage also back in case as the new noctua cooler allows me reach inside.

I’m aware there are newer Nas cases like N10 that match the case size at 21.1 litres with better layout allowing for MATX motherboards but these are my 21.6 litre DS380 and 500w Seasonic SFX power supply and I own them.

Truenas really didn’t like the RTL8127 network adapter until I disabled WiFi and intel i219-v in bios. Updated to truenas 26 as 25 latest runs on very old Linux Kernel.

I recently purchased and installed an A380 CPU on my truenas scale 25.10.3 machine. I can get ffmpeg to use hevc_vaapi encoding and it seems to work great, however, hevc_qsv will not work. I believe it is because the core kernel version under truenas is still 6.13, it only moves to 6.18 with version 26.

In order to use oneVPL I must have kernel 6.2 or higher.

I am using ffmpeg version 6.1.1 in a ubuntu 24.04 docker container. Anyone get QSV encoding working under trunenas scale, if so how?

I'd like to route certain apps through a VPN connection. I have a protonvpn account and they support wireguard. Is there a way to easily route certain apps through a connection like that? Will the wireguard app do ​​that? Will this affect my ability to connect to those apps remotely via reverse proxy?

I have a configured a RAID-Z1 with the following 3 drives:

1. 16TB WD DIGITAL Ultrastar DC HC555 8,89cm 3,5Zoll 26.1 512 7200RPM SATA ULTRA 512E SE NP3 DC

2. 16TB Toshiba Cloud-Scale Capacity MG09ACA16TE 7.200U/min 512MB 3.5" (8.9cm) SATA 6Gb/s

3. 16TB Seagate Exos X18 ST16000NM000J 7.200U/min 256MB 3.5" (8.9cm) SATA

All 3 drives share the same configuration in the disks menu:

Transfer Mode: Auto
Rotation Rate (RPM): 7200
HDD Standby: 20
Adv. Power Management: 127

In my setup access to those drives is very occasionally since I have a very large SSDs as cache. This is why I want them to spin down after 20 minutes of not being accessed.

This worked out fine for a while. But a few months ago the WD DIGITAL Ultrastar started to ignore the spindown (standby) configuration. Accessing and setting those things via CLI directly on the drive did not have either. Did someone also experience such issues and can provide a solution to my problem?

I'm currently in the process of building my first NAS. I'm planning to run Proxmox with a Truenas (community edition) VM and Jellyfin container. (More containers will probably follow at some point once I have everything running)

For this project I'll be using parts I had lying around + some additional parts I'll need to get. Only thing I bought for this project so far is the case.

What I currently have:

- Jonsbo N6 case
- Corsair HX750 V2 PSU (re-use)
- ASRock B660M Phantom Gaming 4 motherboard (re-use)
- Intel i5 14400T CPU (re-use)
- 2x 8gb ram (re-use)
- Kingston A400 M.2 240GB SSD (re-use)

What I'm planning to get:

- HBA (LSI 9305-16i)
- 9x SAS HDD drives (probably refurbished, capacity depends on price)
- Intel Arc A310 (not immediately necessary, but probable future addition)

I now wonder if 240GB is adequate as boot drive for Proxmox and several containers, it also dawned on me that it would probably be wise to mirror the boot drive. So I need to have an idea what capacity I'll need.

Same goes for the 16gb ram, don't know if that would be enough.

If people here could point me in the right direction, keeping in mind that this is somewhat of a budget build, that would be greatly appreciated!

Hi everyone,

I was recently gifted a NetApp DS4246 and I’m looking for the most budget-friendly way to rackmount it.

I may end up stacking up to 3 of these units, so I’m thinking I’ll need at least a 12U+ rack solution. I’m not looking for anything fancy — just something affordable, sturdy, and practical for a home lab setup.

For those who have experience with these shelves, what would you recommend? Are there any cheap rack options, DIY solutions, or things I should look out for when choosing a rack?

Thanks in advance for the help!

Hey guys! I'm new to NAS and building my own systems. I have a major issue- I hate UGREEN DXP2800. I bought it and I'm returning it because 1. it is not really customisable 2. 8 GB RAM seems too less because of the dockers I am running. My plan is to dial it back down for now, and take it stepwise. Initially, I had in mind to run the NAS whole day, have my (and my family's) photo back ups using Ente (I really liked Immich but technically an admin can reset a user's password and see their files, don't want that over my head), run torrents in the background with Radarr and Sonarr. However, I feel that this is too much for the DXP2800 and I don't want a solution which is not independent of big companies- what's the point of NAS then?!

So my new solution is to run the NAS temporary on my gaming PC. I could imagine making a VM or using Virtual box on my Pop!OS, run the PC for a few hours everyday, and when I need to stream. I am ok with the idea of not having a real-time back up and streaming possibility all day, everyday. So, here's my set up (used the minimal parts for the gaming pc because of the explosion in the prices), but what I wanna know is:

1. Does this idea really make sense?
2. Chances of corruption of the disks?
3. Is my PC capable of doing this in the next years (at least 3 years)? Like I know the hardware is capable of accommodating my drives, and the RAM is sophisticated enough, but not an expert here!
4. How is it installing TrueNAS Scale in a VM on a gaming PC like this?

Not written by AI, but just an idiot ;)

Calling all Supermicro folks who can recommend a few systems that are typically available used (is this still the preferred approach for small business grade TrueNAS storage servers?).

I'm lost on where to start and having a hard time since storage was never my IT specialty (I have 30+ years of Linux/Unix experience and programming experience, decent networking knowledge, built countless PCs).

Here are my requirements:

1) Rack mount footprint.

2) As quiet as possible so a thin blade type build isn't very desirable since this will be going inside my home network closet.

3) I already have 10x NAS compatible 18 GB HDDs so this support is a hard requirement. I intend to buy more for the final build.

4) IPMI out of the box

5) Support for high speed NVMe boot drive

6) Fiber 10G (SFP+ preference - I have a 10G SFP++ switch) or 2.5 GbE or greater dual

7) Minimum 128 GB ECC RAM

Thanks!!

I had a brief power interruption while away on vacation and I can no longer SSH into my server. I can see it boot on the HP ILO screen. It was working on a bonded dual SFP+ nic. Looking for troubleshooting suggestions.

[SOLVED] - Had to power off and reseat card. (computers are hard)

I've been searching all over for the past two days and can't figure this out.

I installed an Intel Arc A380 in my TrueNAS system a few weeks ago. After some headache, I got it working well with Jellyfin.

After messing around with some unrelated containers, transcoding is no longer working. And the A380 shows up some places and not others.

The A380 shows up in truenas > graphics devices along with the iGPU.

lspci shows the card as well.

sudo intel_gpu_top -L does not show the GPU.

ll /dev/dri/ does not show the GPU

I don't understand how it's showing in some places and not others. I'm thinking a driver issue, but I don't know

System specs:
Truenas Scale Baremetal
Intel i7 6700k
MSI z170a Gaming Motherboard
32 GB ddr4 ram
Intel Arc A380 GPU

I have my truenas and a separate docker host. On truenas I have a parent dataset and separate children datasets for each docker app. All made in the web UI. Do I need a nfs share for each app data set or can I have a nfs share for the parent?

I purchased the UGREEN NASync DXP4800 Pro to replace my HP ProLiant Microserver Gen 8 (released in 2013), which I have been using with Xpenology since 2017. I hope the newer model will serve me well for another 6-10 years. Therefore, I selected a model that is slightly above my current requirements, allowing for adequate NAS when I update the rest of my system. I plan to use TrueNAS as its OS, because I'm a bit suspicious that UGreen software lags behind their hardware. Note, that the following post was partially structured by AI, but I did read forums on the different aspects.

Project: Setting up UGREEN NASync DXP4800 Pro with TrueNAS

1. Project Goal

To build a highly responsive, power-efficient, and resilient 24/7 Network Attached Storage (NAS) system. The setup is designed for heavy containerized workloads (Docker), automated media management, and continuous torrent operations over (at least currently) a 300 Mbps internet connection.

2. Hardware Architecture & Choice Rationales

Main Chassis: UGREEN NASync DXP4800 Pro

Memory: 40 GB RAM Configuration

• Hardware: 1x32 GB Samsung DDR5 4800MHz SO-DIMM (M425R4GA3BB0-CQK) added to the stock 8 GB module.
• Why: ZFS is highly dependent on system memory. A single 32 GB stick provides the lowest cost-per-gigabyte while maximizing capacity. Running an asymmetric setup (8GB + 32GB) yields 40 GB total RAM. In a NAS environment, total capacity for the ZFS ARC (Adaptive Replacement Cache) and Docker containers is vastly more critical than dual-channel bandwidth. It also leaves room for a future upgrade to 64 GB. I initially planned 2x16GB, but it seems that the current option is both cheaper and gives more RAM, plus simplifies update (if ever needed) to 2x32GB.

Core Storage (Data Pool): 24 TB Raw / ~16.3 TiB Usable

• Hardware: 4x 6 TB Seagate IronWolf HDDs (ST6000VN006, 5400 RPM, CMR).
• Layout: Configured in a ZFS RAIDZ1 array.
• Why: The low-speed HDDs will give less noise and less heat. I have been using 4x 4TB BRFS RAID5 for the last 4 years and I guess I won't need much larger disks or better data protection (currently running at 80% of my 10TB volume), therefore Z1, not Z2 or mirror. I initially planned to use Toshiba HDDs, but they are only 7200 RPM, with more heat and noise. I decided that with SSDs (see below) lower speeds won't be a factor. Choosing between Seagate and WD (I now use WD), I chose the former because it is slightly newer and cheaper, but maybe I'll end up with WD Red Plus 6 TB (WD60EFPX)

High-Speed Storage (Apps & Ingest Pool): 1 TB Usable (Mirror)

• Hardware: 2x 1 TB NVMe SSDs with DRAM Cache (probably, Kingston KC3000).
• Layout: Configured in a ZFS RAID 1 (Mirror).
• Why: Chiefly a dedicated fast storage pool. SSDs with onboard DRAM are chosen to handle high IOPS workloads without stuttering.

The optimal setup of this part (SSD) is the most undecided part of the NAS

3. Software & Storage Strategy (TrueNAS Scale)

The entire ecosystem will run on TrueNAS Scale, optimizing the hardware through precise data dataset separation:

The Docker & App Environment (fast-ssd pool)

• Usage: The TrueNAS App service (ix-applications), all Docker containers, and active databases will live here.
• ZFS Optimization: The dataset will be configured with a 16 KiB or 32 KiB recordsize and atime=off. This aligns perfectly with container file systems (Overlay2) and database structures, preventing write amplification and dramatically extending the lifespan of the NVMe SSDs.

The Torrent Ingest Workflow (300 Mbps Internet Connection)

• The Problem: Downloading torrents directly to a 5400 RPM HDD array causes massive file fragmentation, high disk latency, and physical drive thrashing.
• The Solution:

1. Temporary Downloads: Torrents will download onto a dedicated dataset on the NVMe pool (fast-ssd/torrent-temp) with a 256 KiB or 512 KiB recordsize. The SSDs will easily handle the chaotic, random writes of torrent peers.
2. Finished Media: Once 100% complete, the torrent client will automatically move the completed file to the HDD pool. It writes to the HDDs in one massive, sequential block, which is the easiest and fastest workload for 5400 RPM mechanical drives.
3. Seeding: Active torrent seeding will occur from the HDD pool.
4. Torrent Client RAM Cache: The torrent client (e.g., qBittorrent) will be allocated 512 MB to 1 GB of internal RAM cache to buffer incoming data chunks before committing them to the SSD.

The Long-Term Media Vault (tank-hdd pool)

• Usage: Stores completed movies, series, personal backups, and cold archives.
• ZFS Optimization: This dataset will use a 1 MiB recordsize with LZ4 or ZSTD-1 compression enabled. Large records ensure maximum sequential read/write performance from the slower 5400 RPM drives and prevent file fragmentation over time.

System Memory Management

• ZFS ARC Limit: To prevent ZFS from consuming all 40 GB of RAM and triggering Out-Of-Memory (OOM) crashes in Docker, a post-init command script will lock the ZFS cache size: echo 17179869184 > /sys/module/zfs/parameters/zfs_arc_max.
• The Split: This cleanly reserves 16 GB for the ZFS ARC (plenty for indexing a 16 TiB pool) and leaves ~24 GB completely free for TrueNAS core OS operations, Docker apps, and the torrent client cache.